FACT: If you trust your barometer of good and evil, the ends will always justify the means.

As he was holding the sheets up to the light, I took a moment to make a face. I was in the a Superior Court room. The dude in charge was looking at an only-slightly-coffee-stained sheet of graph paper.

While the paper was between our us, I took an obscured moment to scrunch my face and release the tension from it. Deep inhale, let it out.

"So...this is....what, exactly, again?"

Honestly? It was just math. The terms were simple. distance, speed, time. force. Fungibles.

I took one more deep breath, about to walk through the scribblings with him. But, instead of allowing me, he took my citation and scribbled the word nolle.

Now. I've been pulled over many times. This once, I had even been written a ticket. (No, I won't tell you the details because go fuck yourself, but let's say that 2006 was a weird year involving several choice encounters with the lawand that Jesus -- or whichever source of creation that you pray to -- did not dream up the Audi r8 for taking tempered joyrides to the local grocery store.) The one constant is that I am not endangering other human lives and I always attempt to excuse myself from interactions with police as quickly, politely, and stealthily as possible.

I don't feel as though I am above the law -- I had shown up in court that day, after all. But last night, I was pulled over again for rolling a stop sign on an empty road at 3am.

So, let me ask you this: If I live in a culture where women are expected to feel threatened in certain situations (i.e. alone, late at night), what's wrong with leveraging that assumption (i.e. acting scared to be alone, late at night) to get out of a ticket?

I didn't ask for a loophole, I just played into one that was available to me. If we don't write the rules, can we be blamed for playing the game?